The foam board sign with the message BECA– USE THEY’RE TRYING TO DRIVE OUR PLANET OFF A CLIFF that I wear around my neck at Zuccotti Park has another message lettered on the reverse side: NYPD: END STOP & FRISK, a souvenir of last week’s Harlem demonstration focused on that theme. When traveling to Manhattan, I usually carry the sign in a large blue plastic bag that is evidently more transparent than I’d assumed. As I sat waiting for the train at the Prospect Park station this afternoon, the man sitting next to me on the bench (one of those wooden ones with dividers to prevent the weary from lying down on them) leaned over and said, “Miss, do you mind if I ask, who are the NYPD stopping and frisking?” I started to explain. “That’s me,” he said. “I live in the projects and they’re doing that to me all the time.” I realized he must have been sounding me out, trying to find out where I stood on the issue. He started talking about the things he’d been through, said he was part of a class action suit against the NYPD for strip searching people accused of misdemeanors. “Do you know how many times they’ve framed me? It happened so often I forgot how many times.” He was unimpressed by my account of the Harlem rally. “You can’t stop them. They’re just gonna keep on doing it anyway.”

Standing on Liberty Street, I began my reading with poems from a chapbook by Linda Hogan, Daughters, I Love You, published in 1981 by Loretto Heights College. The poems circle around the theme of human survival; many of them refer to the bombing of Hiroshima and other events connected to the nuclear threat. They speak of family, tribal culture, and connection to the earth as a fragile counterweight to the forces of destruction: “How quickly we could vanish,/your skin nothing.” “This moment the world continues.” I’ve had a copy of this small saddle-stitched book, its cover graphic the ghost of a hand print looming above the title, probably since the year of its publication, and its quiet intensity has never left me. I seemed to have lost it for a while, and then it turned up in a file folder among notes for an essay on humanity’s lack of imagination in the face of our self-manufactured collective peril.

I also read several poems by Joy Harjo from an early book, She Had Some Horses  (Thunder’s Mouth Press,  1983). Somehow I’ve always loved and been touched by this book in a way that hasn’t been true for more recent work of Harjo’s. I especially love the litany of the title poem (“She had horses who were bodies of sand./She had horses who were maps drawn of blood./She had horses who were skins of ocean water./…She had some horses she loved./She had some horses she hated.//These were the same horses.”) An Occupation is a wonderful place in which to read a litany–to really let yourself go reading it. I finished with “I Give You Back,” which seemed to contain a special message for the moment: “I release you, my beautiful and terrible/fear. I release you…./I give you back to the white soldiers/who burned down my home, beheaded my children,/raped and sodomized my brothers and sisters.” Of course the question of the role of fear in perpetuating suffering is universal, and at the same time, a poem like this raises the key question that OWS is confronting (or failing to confront) as it continues to elaborate the metaphor of “the 99%” in the teeth of all our differences. To quote from an article by Manissa McCleave Maharawal in the most recent (October 22) issue of The Occupied Wall Street Journal (“So Real It Hurts: Building a New Republic”): “Let me tell you what it feels like as a woman of color to stand in front of a white man and explain privilege to him. It hurts. It makes you tired. Sometimes it makes you want to cry. Sometimes it is exhilarating. Every single time it is hard.”

I will remember, from today, the sudden, mysterious saturation of Jews for Jesus folks handing out mustard-colored fliers all around the park’s perimeter. The middle-aged African American woman who was quite insistent in her efforts to start a conversation about a business matter (“Do you shop on the Internet? Do you get paid for it?). The gaggle of kids from a Manhattan public school–they looked to be in third or fourth grade–two of whom read my sign with some interest, and told me they were on a class trip to Fraunces Tavern. The powerful smell of felafel from the food carts. The white man of late middle age who approved of my sign, stopped to listen to a poem, and said, “The one in Oakland was much smaller.” (I only found out after I got home that “the one in Oakland” was raided early this morning.) Signs: NEXT STEP–GENERAL STRIKE and CORPORATE TYCOONS GOT US LIVING LIKE RACCOONS.

Later, I had to have my eyes dilated and my eye doctor, who knows me pretty well, took one look at me with my bagged sign under my arm and said, “Whatever you have in that bag, would you please leave it in there?” Then he told me a funny story about how he used to treat a lot of Socialist Workers Party members, and after one of them had been in for an appointment, copies of their newspaper, The Militant, would be on every chair in his waiting room.